Love All

As it’s a royal wedding day what happens if your prince doesn’t appear? This perennial problem runs through the fiction of so many women writers from Fanny Burney onwards. Is a poor spinsterhood better than settling for the next best man with a good home and income - a Charlotte Lucas marriage? The spirit of Austen hovers at the edge of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel; Elinor, Anne Elliot and even Lucas herself. Women here are working and having their own sexual lives but their emotional lives are still dependent on their men folk. In Mary (rather old fashioned like a Charlotte M Yonge character although she works as a part time home economics teacher) there is a touching exploration of this dilemma even in the early 1960s; selfless show more love and selfish – but entirely natural - love. She is counterpoised by the dazzling Persephone, Marianne Dashwood with a sexual life that is a mess slowly realising that she is in love with love itself. The trauma is how their tangled lives are resolved and how each character comes to the finality of whether to spend their lives alone or with another and who that one will be. With the putting to rest of a haunting presence the closing of the final pages leaves one wondering whether any of them made the right decision. I’m still ruminating on them, worrying about them as though they were my friends. show less

A disappointing book to plough through. The writer lacks her earlier conviction with character portrayal. This is especially evident in the two principal female characters who turn to martyrdom rather than grasping a life for themselves.
For someone who once wrote with power and insight, "Love All" is a weak effort with little to recommend it.

Before reading Love All, I'd read The Cazalet Chronicle, Elizabeth Jane Howard's four-volume series about the lives of an upper-middle-class English family between 1937 and 1947, which had long sections from the point of view of the different main characters. Love All is set in the late 1960s, but the technique is similar, with sections from many different characters' points of view. Here, however, I felt that the sections were often too short, and too many characters' points of view were used - some of whom fade from view as the novel continues. It took me quite a while to get my head around who the characters were, and how they were related.

That aside, though, this book has many of the virtues that made The Cazalet Chronicle so show more enjoyable. EJH is excellent at delineating character, and whereas I wasn't always convinced by her depictions of the male Cazalets, both the male and the female characters in Love All are convincing. The story looks like it may be a fairly conventional romance - various couples finding love by the end of the book - but all is not as it seems, and the book shows the cascading effect of seemingly small decisions and coincidences. It's well worth reading. (4/5) show less

On the whole I enjoyed this book but found that there were so many characters introduced in individual chapters that it became difficult to follow who was who. However those characters that did stand out enough to be easily remembered provoked interest and empathy and certainly kept me reading on. It's a story that twists and turns and hints at one outcome before hinting at another, while also touching on many family and personal issues.

I adored the Cazalet books, but for some reason I didn't enjoy this novel, and couldn't bring myself to care about the characters.

A disappointingly ordinary book from an author that I usually admire: more B-grade beach reading than beloved modern classic.

Elizabeth Jane Howard does Katie Fforde. But without the happy ending.